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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed all 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 appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: 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 objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist