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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – 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 politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; 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 lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer