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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, 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 population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise 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 anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer