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What, exactly, 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 the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry 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 proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist