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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right 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 boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist