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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members 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