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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer