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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist