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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other 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 sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist