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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

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 approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution 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 draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality 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 continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist