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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total 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 desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer