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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 initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting 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, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic 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 more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions 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 unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist