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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist