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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist