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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer