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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; similar 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 California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist