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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade 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; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives 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 associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist