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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical 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 GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer