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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer