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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication 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 rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic 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 most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer