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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the level 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 necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer