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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist