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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration 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 in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn 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, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once 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 practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer