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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – 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 notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts 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 questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer