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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five 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 also following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen 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 opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist