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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument 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 worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist