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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer