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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on 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 holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned 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 say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful 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 become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power 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 California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer