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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, 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 retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant 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 take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer