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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 executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – 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 not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer