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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded 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 sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer