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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters 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: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger 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 critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates 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 columnist