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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, 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 eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist