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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist