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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state 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 the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates 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 writer