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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – 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 reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn 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 implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen 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 lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer