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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term 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 was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer