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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define 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 initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire 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 the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer