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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer