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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in 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 measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee 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 a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored 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 become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, 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 power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer