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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave 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 motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight 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 appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist