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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer