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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats 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 a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist