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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer