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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect 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, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct 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, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist