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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn 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 genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; 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 the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer