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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian 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 far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer