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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process 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 initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own maps in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer