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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 power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument 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 worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer