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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: 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 nonpartisan redistricting panels, 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 proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use 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 find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist