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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 initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist