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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer