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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. 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 uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian 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 declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members 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