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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these 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 not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer