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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, 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 desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined 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 fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist