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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. 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 California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist