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What, precisely, 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 presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide 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 response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer