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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, 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 issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, 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 measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer