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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed 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 taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist