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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down 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 issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist