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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large 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 control of the House and a longstanding feeling, 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-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant 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 criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. 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 Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist