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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

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

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created 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 democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force members 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