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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a body 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, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates 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 writer