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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure 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 critique, 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 wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, 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 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist