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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse 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 allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved 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 response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, 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 ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad 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, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel 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