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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist