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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist