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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the fight 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 does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist