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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district 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 truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy 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 better situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount 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 once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist