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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 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 upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. 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 practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer