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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area 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 genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist