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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance 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 result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist