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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, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections 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 no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action 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 districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure long-term positions 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 objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once 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 lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer