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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

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

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent 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 second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist