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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right 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, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist