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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, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

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

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer