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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist