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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, 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 measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist