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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal 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 issue of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to 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 passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer