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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed 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 control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control 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-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable 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 emulating the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; 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 battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer