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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use 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 part of a body 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 something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer