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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 determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer