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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide 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 political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist