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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass 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 do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer