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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. 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 operating smoothly.

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 institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, 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 recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer