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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer