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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative 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 harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. 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 Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist