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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent 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, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, 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 world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant 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 sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer