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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or appropriations 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 continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer