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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

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

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after 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 lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability 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 the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer