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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer