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What, precisely, 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 become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California 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 ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: 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 engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause 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 Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist