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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these 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 people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five 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. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats 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, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer