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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left 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 electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause 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 lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct 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 writer