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What, exactly, 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, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, 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 was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, 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 valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s 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 revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen 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 lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer