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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; 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 mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist