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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, 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 reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members 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