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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. 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 reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist