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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 authority 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 the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in 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 redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist