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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – 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 resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility 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 implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer