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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent 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 shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist