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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed 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 don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats 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 across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new 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 associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer