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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; 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 emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats 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 second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist