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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’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 examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives 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 members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist