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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 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 next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer