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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, 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 are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw 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 second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select 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 creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist