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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer