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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer