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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist