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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

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 institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors 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