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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations 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 Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist