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What, precisely, 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 vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer