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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

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

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once 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 fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer