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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue 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 era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer