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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. 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 controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn 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 genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations 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