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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is drawn 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 truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist