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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. 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 turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to 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 California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer