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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is able 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 lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital 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 sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist