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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist