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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist