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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist