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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer