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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. 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 help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, 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 creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer