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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 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 voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures 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 redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel 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