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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. 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 the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist