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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist