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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations 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.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer