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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

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

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure permanent positions 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 objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer