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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are made 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 able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, 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 holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer