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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance 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 election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist