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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer