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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s 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 the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, 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 in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist