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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates 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