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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim 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 steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors 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