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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in 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 explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer