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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. 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 practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer