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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, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated 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 independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided 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 designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic 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 implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions 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.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer