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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy 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 situation – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – 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 select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer