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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps 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 political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant 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 initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering 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 necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer