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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 tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created 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 means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist