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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist