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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, 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 retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist