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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer