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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 congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party 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 response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge 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 questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. 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 reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist