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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 initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as 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 power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved 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, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process 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 the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members 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 era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist