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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give Republicans an five more seats 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. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice 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 thing that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer