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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic 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 world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament 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 Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer