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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, 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 become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer