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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created 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 implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist