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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down 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 dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly 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’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP 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 GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: 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 second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer