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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue 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 rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, 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 taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer