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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver 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 liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent 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, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members 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 writer