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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs 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 institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist