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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched 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 government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist