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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 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 special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer