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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn 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 representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant 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 merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP 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 Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force members 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