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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion 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 valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer