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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence 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 address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates 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