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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. 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 all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition 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 not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer