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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn 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 chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: 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 critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference 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 become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer