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

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, 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 alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist