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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – 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 executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control 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-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization 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 Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, 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 worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force 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