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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good 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 noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer