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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist