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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist