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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning political system 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 initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions 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 boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer