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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause 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 battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist