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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist