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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen 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 the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist