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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer