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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: 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 without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer