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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district 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 democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored 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 actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist