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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

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

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created 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 suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. 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 authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer