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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district 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 democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist