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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split 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 clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal 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 circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to 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 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force members 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