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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 legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge 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 government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the amount 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. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, 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 Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer