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What, precisely, is the role of 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 prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: 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 implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer