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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote 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 views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize 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 merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist