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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, 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 operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and anger 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 caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something 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 opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. 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 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist