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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is created 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 truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer