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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

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

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much 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 fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer