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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer