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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer