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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, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates 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 writer