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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

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

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist