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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched 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 government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer