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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country 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 the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist