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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: 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, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic 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 additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist