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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. 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 California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer