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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act 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, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted 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 rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer