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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed 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 issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps 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 other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted 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 rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist