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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer