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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle 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 reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer