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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more 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 Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something 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 practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist