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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer