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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer