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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist