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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps 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 other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist