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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital 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 asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed 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 question of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure 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 objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer