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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, 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 continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own maps in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer