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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn 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 truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist