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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist