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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal 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 question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area 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 democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist