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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined 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 lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force 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