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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw 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 California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States 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 – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer