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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a response 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 positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates 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