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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent 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 government shut down – 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 resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after 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 legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, 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 California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe 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 crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer