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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created 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 democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. 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 the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer