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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly 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 truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able 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 once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist