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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much 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 fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer