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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s 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 motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist