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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something 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 lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional 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 inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist