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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide 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 across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation next year; 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 alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist