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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 crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help 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 embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer