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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. 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 become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist