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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting 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 additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer