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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – 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 are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial 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 proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, 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 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 undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer