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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern 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 measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist