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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control 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-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result 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 muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist