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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize 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 spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, 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 demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after 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 practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. 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 Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer