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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

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

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent 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 examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer