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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist