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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist