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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer