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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, 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 operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer