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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal 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 question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist