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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions 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 guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions 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.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist