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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

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

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 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 approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, 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-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist