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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the 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 issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled 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 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 genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer