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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big 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 closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory 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 strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist