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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help California’s Proposition 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 the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control 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 redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something 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 opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist