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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently 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 federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled 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 retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist