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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just 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 shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state 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 made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer