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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

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

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: 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 second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire 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 not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer