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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 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 next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area 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 genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist