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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist