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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire 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 harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict 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 Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer