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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist