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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right 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 power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability 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 the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force 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 writer