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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats 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, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US 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 aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing 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 voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able 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 the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist