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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 initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election 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 process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist