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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn 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 democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer