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What, exactly, 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 turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely 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 ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

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

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn 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 implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions 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 maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign 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 mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist