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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate 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