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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, 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 world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist