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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer