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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist