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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money 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 recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer