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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved 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 response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – 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 undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats 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 actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist