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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to 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 state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic 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 representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist