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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 authority to declare war, long considered 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 asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering 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 principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack 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 turn, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched 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 era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates 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 columnist