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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 unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer