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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as 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 his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer