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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives 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 investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer