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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, 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 executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer