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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time 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 part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer