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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, 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 longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist