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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance 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 ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal 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 House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful 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 select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer