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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created 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 representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense 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 actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total 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 confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good 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 creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist