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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not 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 procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system 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 argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist