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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist