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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial 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 state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define 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 own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist