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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, 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 possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist