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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, 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 US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel 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 columnist