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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, 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 Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true 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 pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched 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 authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist