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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire 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 dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist