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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become 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 control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete 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 undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer