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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer