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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, 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 was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries 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 other objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist