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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something 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 lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist