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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist