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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 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 voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer