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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution 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 significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist