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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs 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 respective maps in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats 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 inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer