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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of 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 ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight 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 appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer