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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could 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 approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist