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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. 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 presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more 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. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area 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 genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront 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 better world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist