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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer