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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative 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, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist