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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs 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 argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States 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 – 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 politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer