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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist