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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money 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 omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

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

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional 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. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own maps in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing 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 substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer