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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, 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 proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist