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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver 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 across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. 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 does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer