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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology 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, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer