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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections 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 resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist