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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided 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-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created 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 dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer