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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer