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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled 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 truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that secure permanent 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 other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer