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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented 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 Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of harm 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. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members 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