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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans 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 Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to 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 state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions 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 columnist