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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

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

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 additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist