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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time 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 additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist