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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced 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 reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist