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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power 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 September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

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 upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure long-term 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 objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist