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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions 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. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group 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 five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures 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 change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats 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, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer