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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 declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. 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 has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 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 embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn 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 genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in response, fails 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 engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist