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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue 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 era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members 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 writer