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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors 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