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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist