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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist