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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist