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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, 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 better situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once 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 does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist