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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist