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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures 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 retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering 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 required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist