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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist