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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent positions for their party: 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 second critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer