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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down 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 Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist