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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution 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 even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations 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 Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power 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 institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer