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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats 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 years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist