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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal 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 additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, 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 manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist