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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not 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 process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy 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 first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer