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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize 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 own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act 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 motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist