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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer