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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time 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 power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer