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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, 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 procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize 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 own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary 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 Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist