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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created 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, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates 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 columnist