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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle 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 measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure 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 objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist