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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist