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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer