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What, precisely, 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 crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose 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 impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; 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 fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched 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 stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer