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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting 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 leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced 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 response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer