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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election 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 muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains 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 significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members 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 columnist