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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues 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 controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help 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 the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: 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 second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer