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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant 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 initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions 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 revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist