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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch 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 vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist