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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

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

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from 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 red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: 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 doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist