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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. 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 passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist