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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic 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 United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist