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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent 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 objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; 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 fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist