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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial 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 just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: 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 critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is 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 Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer