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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned 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, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist