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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer