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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer