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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, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist