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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

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 embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the battle 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 reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer