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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

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 the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the level 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 once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors 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