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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose 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 way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion 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 critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw 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 behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, 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 retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer