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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures 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 redraw maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors 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