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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. 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 Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist