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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist