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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the 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 all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help 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 more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist