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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

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

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence 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 confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise 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 anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist