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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in 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 California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer