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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense 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 GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition 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 politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist