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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle 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