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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

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

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer