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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, 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 Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist