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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

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 controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members 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 columnist