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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 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 upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: 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 actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist