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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication 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 won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist