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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 initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, 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 as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist