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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer