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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, 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 California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely 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 democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, 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 disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer