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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant 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 initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist