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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer