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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 crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way 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 alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area 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 representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist