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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer