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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once 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 fails to in reality have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist