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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed all 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 be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members 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