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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’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 upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy 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 first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed 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 a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer