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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors 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