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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, 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 party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist