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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, 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 Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer