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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. 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 U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation 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 hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing 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 representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer