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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial 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. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer