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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, 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 autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state 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 transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist