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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 declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist