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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings 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 columnist