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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer