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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

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 the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer