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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 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 upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer