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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear 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 Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer