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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist