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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist