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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give 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 Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize 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 own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist