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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed 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 appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. 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 reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer