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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, 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 sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist