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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become 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 Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist