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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as 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 claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist