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What, exactly, 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 become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer