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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist