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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these 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 uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer