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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist