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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent 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 citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

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

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological 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 means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress 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 authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist