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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer