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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

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

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, 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 state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer