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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

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

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 embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own maps in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates 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