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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer