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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions 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. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn 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 means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist