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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer