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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into 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 boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions 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 redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist