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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods 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’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist