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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more 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 following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer