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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer