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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a functioning 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 critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist