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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share 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 Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly 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 give the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer