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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

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

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. 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 even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is created 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 truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington 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 government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer