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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided 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 measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer