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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. 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 citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making 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 Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer