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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer