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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state 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 made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer