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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election 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 long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer