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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs 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 irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address 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 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 unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer