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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area 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 implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize 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 own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. 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 Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer