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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. 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 election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer