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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed 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 objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure 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 other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much 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 lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer