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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is drawn 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 genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of 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 manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist