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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control 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 leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer