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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer