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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 tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer