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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer