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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 declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed 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 create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views 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 Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist