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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

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

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled 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 Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist