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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good 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 become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist