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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: 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 genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, 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 different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist