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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 murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending 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 power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply 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 closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House 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-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist