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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to 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 response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members 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 writer