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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist