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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. 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 humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right 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 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 not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch 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 the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct 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 writer