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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power 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 as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist