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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation 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 following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist