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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, 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 merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer