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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic 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 more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer