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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions 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 lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 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 Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, 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 worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist