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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer