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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly 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 five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force 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 writer