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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign 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 successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer