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What, exactly, 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 turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills 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 increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic 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 redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen 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 Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist