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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors 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