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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all 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 Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation 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 also emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist