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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn 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, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer