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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer