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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, 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 conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer