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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; 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 emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their own maps in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist