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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist