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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided 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 response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer