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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade 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’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist