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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all 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 the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable 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 attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign 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 mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not 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 thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist