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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire 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 rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party 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 developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates 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 writer