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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, 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 disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist