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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body 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 additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’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 autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched 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 politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer