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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer