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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer