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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, 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 humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive 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 lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist