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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist