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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. 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 installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country 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, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer