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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer