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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another 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 murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist