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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs 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 irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions 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 occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn 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 democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – 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 mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer