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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, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove 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; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. 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 autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer