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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist