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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California 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 give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist