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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard 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 the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails 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 actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer