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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological 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 genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government 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 member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates 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 writer