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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second 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 years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the 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 for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives 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 made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle 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