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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. 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 California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer