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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, 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 control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: 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 truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, 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 the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct 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 columnist