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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

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

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term positions 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 second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer