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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, 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 White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial 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 measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after 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 practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist