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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is 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 Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct 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