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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following 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 most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design 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 created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist