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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of 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 ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist