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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting 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, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. 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 presidency keeps on humming along.

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

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect 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 utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist