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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack 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 confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist