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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats 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 developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount 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 democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate 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 significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer