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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down 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 dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological 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 implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist