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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help the state of 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 Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer