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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans 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 incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer