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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer