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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist