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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant 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 objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – 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 required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after 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 does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist