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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 declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent seats 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 significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer