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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist