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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, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist