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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created 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 representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still 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 the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist