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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist