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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist 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 embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel members 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