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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided 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 proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist