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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital 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, conducting strikes 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, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, 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 state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized 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 become a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist