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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide 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 Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer