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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now 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 increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result 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 power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP 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, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist