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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created 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 democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal 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 in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer