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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations 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 care who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer