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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down 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 dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer