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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer