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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves 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 alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist