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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’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 seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist