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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

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

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited 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 the right to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer