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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’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 captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant 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 the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. 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 distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves 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 close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist