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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer