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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes 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 alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy 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 situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates 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 writer