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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional 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 nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical 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 required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer