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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps 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 Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist