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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

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

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. 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 situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist