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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication 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 has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist