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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

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 in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term 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 years.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer