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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist 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 Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument 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 considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own maps in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement 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 true that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer