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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away 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 also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people 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 presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer