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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential 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. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure 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 Republicans an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right 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 compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; 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 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 democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer