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What, exactly, is the purpose of 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 presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist