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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 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 voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide 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 the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is 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 reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist