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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something 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 mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer