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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount 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. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer