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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist