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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. 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 September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist