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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

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

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures 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 redraw maps that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer