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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

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

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation 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 the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist