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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps 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 measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable 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 necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer