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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

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

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined 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 the right to redraw their own districts in response, 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 without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer