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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions 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 office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, 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 little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington 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 bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics 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 sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist