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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area 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 truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist